Bay City Rolling

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Jan 2012



From Oakland to Vallejo and Napa Valley, breezing along the pacific coast highway to San Francisco, I took in one of my travel dreams courtesy of Facebook



My Facebook friends invite me to San Francisco for the last week of my American trip. I spend the seven hour flight from Atlanta to Oakland thumbing through a contingency list of hotels in case we didn’t click: from Facebook page to real life doesn’t always work. By the time the plane spewed us out at Oakland I was feeling so jet lagged that if the Adams family had met me at Arrivals I wouldn’t have flinched. Shouldn’t have fretted though, we hit it off immediately and for the next week they proudly showed me around their bit of the Golden state.



They live in Vallejo so next day we took the 60 minute windswept Vallejo Baylink ferry into San Francisco, taking in Alcatraz at close quarters, under the Bay Bridge, finishing at San Francisco Pier. We lumber down Market Street to Union Square’s high end stores taking in the ‘must do’ rooftop drink at Macy’s. It’s great for the view down to Union Square’s entertainments but the restaurant service was astoundingly awful.



We drove the scenic route into San Francisco along the pacific coast highway, with its pretty coastal towns hidden in the hills, zigzagging down past WW2 bunkers to Bakers beach. Encountering the Golden Gate Bridge at ground level from Bakers Beach, or looking down from Twin Peaks on the bridge cloaked in downy clouds is majestic. San Francisco bay has this sonata of boat sounds, garrulous ships bells and guttural horns that loiter in my memory even now.



I had the idea that San Francisco would be all hippies and free loving clones but Polk, Folsom and Castro were all bereft of hippy happenings, flower painted jeans and debauched gay guys ‘workin’ it’. What I found was a hip, re-invented city, a golden nugget embedded in the vast Republican bedrock of California.



We drove from Vallejo, along Interstate 780 to the historic waterside city of Benicia in Solano County. The state capitol from 1853 to 1854, Benicia still retains some of its former glory in its architecture with revamped Italianate “Painted ladies” leaning coquettishly on First Street. We headed for the Benicia Arsenal, a former US army Armory, now given over to live-work spaces for artists.



Last day we drove to the Napa Valley but the vineyard tours and wine tasting were wasted on this Gallo guzzling cretin. I sniffed, swirled, swilled and nodded sagely while staggering from winery to winery none the wiser.



Returning to San Fran this Sept

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Photos

cable car san francisco
from market st

harbour pier san francisco
sealions at harbour pier san francisco